Moral Authority and Status in International Relations: Good States and the Social Dimension of Status Seeking William C

Review of International Studies, Vol. 44, part 3, pp. 526–546. doi:10.1017/S0260210517000560 © British International Studies Association 2017. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. First published online 5 December 2017 . Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking William C. Wohlforth Daniel Webster Professor, Dartmouth College Benjamin de Carvalho Senior Research Fellow, NUPI https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Halvard Leira* Senior Research Fellow, NUPI Iver B. Neumann Research Professor, NUPI Abstract We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it. Keywords Status; Foreign Policy, Small and Middle Powers; Moral Authority; Good States; Norway 26 Sep 2021 at 09:52:12 , on Introduction ‘While there is considerable agreement within the political science discipline and foreign 170.106.202.8 policy community that status matters in world affairs’, Jonathan Renshon writes, ‘the depth of our understanding has lagged far behind our confidence.’1 Part of the problem concerns the methodological challenges Renshon has in mind, but part has to do with an unwarranted focus . IP address: on a restricted research question concerning great powers and war. The consensus that status matters – and that it is especially resistant to social science inquiry – is based almost exclusively on research on great powers. If the general consensus about status seeking is true, however, we would expect status concerns to manifest themselves down the inter-state hierarchy as well. * Correspondence to: Halvard Leira, Senior Research Fellow, NUPI, PB 8159 Dept, 0033 Oslo, Norway. Author’s email: [email protected] 1 https://www.cambridge.org/core Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for Status (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 3. 526 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210517000560 Downloaded from Moral authority and status in International Relations Building on earlier work,2 we extract implications for the social dimensions of the international politics of status by focusing on smaller states. This move allows us to reduce the salience of some confounding issues that plague great power status politics, especially the complex interactions among status, reputation, and security seeking. Our aim is to broaden the field of status research by showcasing the . range of policies states – large and small – pursue in order to improve their international standing. We proceed in four sections. First, we unpack the standard claim that status is social, demonstrating that claim’s key implications for smaller states. Using this lens, we then reframe standard applications of social identity theory (SIT) concerning status enhancement strategies, emphasising the idea of seeking to maintain a position or climb the global pecking order by being recognised as a ‘good’ state. This quest for moral authority as a route to status can be reflected in all the ideal type strategies identified in SIT, and all of them can be system-supporting rather than conflictual. With the aim of broadening the research project, the third section examines these arguments in the case of the main actor in our previous research, Norway. Building on this foundation, in the fourth and concluding section we https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms extract other implications for ongoing status research. Status is social Status in international politics is a state’s ‘standing, or rank, in a status community’,3 which, in turn, is related to ‘collective beliefs about a given state’s ranking on valued attributes’. As Renshon emphasises,4 these definitions (and others) make clear that status is positional (it assumes meaning to actors in comparison with other relevant actors); it is perceptual (it is what people think of self and others); and it is social (the beliefs in play are collective beliefs about a given actor’s standing in relation to others). Each of these qualities is crucial but here we focus on the social dimension as arguably the higher order quality. Status is all about social relations between states. It is not about A’s view of B or vice versa. Rather, it is about social facts, that is, widely-held but malleable beliefs in a community. This community may consist of peers or non-peers; in any case, its actors make up what we, following Erik Ringmar, may call a ‘circle of recognition’ for a specific actor’s status , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at claims.5 These higher order, collective beliefs determine an actor’s status. When a state is dissatisfied with its status, those collective beliefs are the source of the problem. When a state seeks status, those collective beliefs are the object of its efforts. While the social nature of status politics is widely acknowledged, it is important to stress that social 26 Sep 2021 at 09:52:12 relations are not limited to situations of conflicts and crises. On the contrary, states are not only , on driven to war by status considerations, but are guided by them in their social dealings with other states in the everyday life of international politics. As we have shown elsewhere,6 a major con- sequence of this is that status concerns are not only the prerogative of the powerful few, but also the 170.106.202.8 torment of small and medium states. This implication stands in direct contrast to the once common assumption that status does not matter for smaller states.7 2 Benjamin de Carvalho and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Small State Status Seeking (Milton Park: Routledge, 2015). IP address: 3 Renshon, Fighting for Status, p. 33. 4 Ibid., ch. 2. 5 Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Kristin Haugevik, ‘Status, small states and significant others: Re-reading Norway’s attraction to Britain in the twentieth century’, in De Carvalho and Neumann (eds), Small State Status Seeking, pp. 42–55. 6 De Carvalho and Neumann (eds), Small State Status Seeking. 7 Michael D. Wallace, ‘Power, status, and international war’, Journal of Peace Research, 1:1 (1971), pp. 23–35 https://www.cambridge.org/core (p. 24); Ned R. Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 74. 527 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210517000560 Downloaded from William C. Wohlforth, Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, Iver B. Neumann Indeed, smaller powers suffer from status insecurity to an extent that established great powers do not, which makes the status game even more important to them. The status seeking of small and middle powers, then, must be distinguished from that of greater powers. Smaller states have limited power resources – so, for them, aiming for status may well be the only game in town.8 Furthermore, . status seeking does not occur in a vacuum. ‘Status’ means the condition of filling a place in a social hierarchy. Granted that the circle of recognition of status claims to being a great power consists of all states in a given system, all great powers depend on non-great powers to acknowledge their great- ness, and so small and middle powers also play a role in constituting great powers. The concept of status is used to refer to actor identities that emerge out of such processes, as well as to the positioning of actors in hierarchies. Allan Dafoe, Renshon, and Paul Huth see these meanings as distinct, and for analytical purposes, it can make sense to keep them apart.9 Socially, however, identities, and most certainly state identities, are hierarchised. Take the identity of a ‘small state’:itis https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms constituted in relation to great powers, and is therefore intrinsically hierarchical. Status seeking refers to acts undertaken to maintain or better one’s placement. As this is something that is done in competition with others, it is by definition a hierarchised activity. Particularly in the case of small states that are heavily integrated in global politics, international status seeking cannot be separated from domestic legitimation games. A state’s place in the hierarchy of states is also its place on the map of global politics. It is through their status that states are emplaced and located on the political map of the world. Status seeking is, therefore, a subcategory of state identity politics. It follows that status is intrinsically coupled with the concept of recognition. There will be no status without recognition. While it is common to view recognition, as linked to agency, and status as linked to structure, we reject this static dichotomy. In our perspective, structure is ever emergent, and it is thus continuously constituted and reconstituted through both attempts at gaining status and the giving or withholding of recognition. Status is thus the result of an intersubjective process and status seeking is a core state activity. Though , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at status has intrinsic rewards, it may also be instrumental, often highly so. States, however, do not seek status from one another in equal measure.

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